Egypt Isn’t Starving Gaza – Israel Is
Thursday, August 28, 2025 at 02:37PM Debunking the latest lie from pro-Israel propagandists: Egypt could open its border crossing with Gaza anytime and end the Israeli-created famine in the Strip. Here's the truth.
by Muhammad Shehada 28 August 2025 Zeteo
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As the world watched in horror the mounting images of starving children and skeletal bodies from Gaza, Israel allowed a rare demonstration late last month against that starvation – in front of the Egyptian embassy in Tel-Aviv. Protesters’ signs blamed Cairo for the famine without mentioning Israel. This awkward display, in contrast to how Israeli authorities routinely assaultand detain protesters against the genocide, reveals the cruel and calculated narrative that is taking root, one that shifts the blame away from the true architect of this manufactured catastrophe in Gaza.
The talking point du jour for Israel’s hasbara crew has now become blaming the Gaza famine (while simultaneously denying a famine is happening) on Egypt’s “closure of the Rafah crossing.” Israel’s key apologists, like Eylon Levy, Eyal Yakoby, and John Spencer, have been berating Cairo almost daily for Israel’s siege on the enclave. “I just learned something absolutely crazy about Gaza, it turns out it has a border with Egypt… Egypt closed its border crossing with Gaza,” Eylon Levy, Benjamin Netanyahu’s former spokesperson, falsely claimed earlier this week.
This deflection is so bizarre that Israel’s own Barak Ravid called out its propagators and emphasized the obvious: that Israel controls all of Gaza’s borders, including the Philadelphi corridor with Egypt. “Nothing and nobody can come in from Egypt without Israeli permission,” Ravid, a reporter for Axios, posted on social media.
Israel’s overriding control of Gaza’s southern borders with Egypt was the norm long before the Israeli military invaded Rafah and completely destroyed the crossing. It even precedes Oct. 7, 2023, by decades.
But let’s start with what Rafah looks like today.
In May 2024, Israel began depopulating and razing Rafah and most of Khan Younis in southern Gaza, and turning the cities into what is today a giant buffer area or “extermination zone,” where civilians who cross into those areas are immediately killed. The only people left in the zone are Israeli troops, Gaza Humanitarian Foundation-contracted mercenaries, and Israel’s proxy Abu Shabab gang.
“Anyone crossing from Egypt into Gaza encounters Israeli forces, not Palestinians,” H. A. Hellyer, a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, tells me. Therefore, if Egypt were to forcefully send food trucks into Gaza, there would be no Palestinians on the other side to receive the aid; it would fall into the hands of Israeli soldiers.
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At the start of the war, Israel reportedly explicitly threatened Egypt that it would bomb any aid convoy heading to Gaza. “The Rafah crossing has been attacked by Israel on numerous occasions with the obvious message that it will not allow humanitarian assistance to go through,” says Ramzy Ezzeldin Ramzy, Egypt’s former permanent UN ambassador and former UN assistant secretary-general. On Oct. 10, 2023, Israel reportedly bombed the Rafah crossing three times with multiple missiles within 24 hours.
Even when Israel, under US pressure, allowed aid trucks from Egypt to enter Gaza through Israel’s Kerem Shalom crossing in Rafah in December 2023, Israel almost immediately bombed the Palestinian side of the crossing, killing the director in charge and three other workers.
Since then, any truck trying to enter Gaza from Egypt has to first go to the Israeli-Egyptian crossing Nitzana, roughly 42km (26 miles) from Gaza’s southern border, unload its cargo for thorough inspection by the Israeli military, and then reload and drive back to Rafah.
Egyptian truck drivers often wait in line for weeks, baking under the desert sun, until Israel grants them permission to enter Nitzana. “At any point in time over the past 22 months, there are hundreds of trucks stranded on the Egyptian side of the border waiting to deliver food and medical supplies,” Ramzy tells me.
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Reporting from outside the Rafah crossing earlier this month, BBC chief international correspondent Lyse Doucet said 5,000 aid trucks were waiting to clear Israeli inspection. Once they do, “they’re going to have to drive a short distance away to go into Gaza through another Israeli crossing because ... the border [here] is shut. It's now controlled by Israeli forces."
The charge that Egypt is the one starving Gaza is “the height of hypocrisy,” Hesham Youssef, a veteran Egyptian diplomat, tells me. “Since the war started, Egypt [has become] the center for providing humanitarian assistance to Gaza. Leaders and senior officials from different places around the world visited the Rafah crossing and witnessed with their own eyes the hundreds of trucks awaiting Israeli approval,” he adds.
The overwhelming majority of aid going to Gaza is indeed warehoused in Egypt. Last month, UNRWA said it had enough aid stuck at the Egyptian border to feed Gaza’s entire population for three months.
Israeli soldiers often reject and turn back entire aid convoys at Nitzana because of the most random technical reasons, like carrying green sleeping bags, seeded fruit, nail clippers, or crutches.
Israel’s History of Controlling Rafah
The Rafah crossing with Gaza was established in 1979 after the Israeli-Egyptian Camp David peace agreement divided Rafah into two halves that were eventually separated with barbed wire and fences, and created a 100-meter-wide buffer zone inside Gaza called the “Philadelphi corridor.” Israel strictly controlled who and what went in or out of the Rafah crossing for decades, including after the 1993 Oslo Accords, which established the Palestinian Authority in Gaza and the West Bank.
It wasn't until 2005, after Israel's so-called "unilateral disengagement" from the Strip, that its forces left the Rafah crossing. However, Israel engineered a framework that left it firmly in control of that crossing despite ostensibly handing it to Egypt and the Palestinian Authority.
The first agreement with Egypt imposed 83 conditions, effectively militarizing and heavily restricting Gaza's border to prevent smuggling or “infiltration,” while the second, with the PA, stripped Palestinians of the ability to import goods or aid through Rafah, mandated that all trucks from Egypt enter Gaza exclusively via Israel’s Kerem Shalom crossing – a crossing Israel created specifically in 2005 to retain total oversight. Israel also maintained overriding power over who could enter or leave Gaza through Rafah; only people with Israel-issued Palestinian IDs or foreign nationals from certain categories were allowed to use the Rafah crossing. The PA was required to notify Israeli authorities 48 hours in advance of a foreign person’s travel date. PA employees would scan and send copies of each passport to Israel for approval before stamping it. Israel also conditioned that Israeli surveillance cameras be installed throughout the crossing and the presence of a European mission to inspect those using the crossings.
After Hamas seized Gaza in 2007 and expelled the PA, both Israel and Egypt closed their crossings. Though Cairo occasionally opened Rafah, its stated rationale for the closure was to pressure Hamas into reconciling with Fatah, which dominated the PA, and prevent an entrenchment of the intra-Palestinian division that undermined the quest for statehood. Egypt was under intense US-Israeli pressure to join Israel’s punishing siege and economic warfare on Gaza to bring down Hamas’ government, but theEgyptians circumvented this pressure by turning a blind eye to the smuggling tunnels Palestinians in the Strip built to import basic necessities to alleviate the dire humanitarian crisis. When Gazans breached the border into Sinai in 2008, Egypt’s president ordered his army to stand down and allowed Gazans to buy necessities totalling over $250 million.
With the 2011 Arab Spring, the Rafah crossing was opened indefinitely, yet remained under indirect Israeli control through surveillance and mandated Egyptian security coordination. When Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi took power in 2013, his regime, hostile to Hamas as a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot, destroyed tunnels and reverted Rafah to intermittent closures, citing Sinai’s instability, until relations were mended through prominent Palestinian politician Mohammed Dahlan. By 2016, Rafah opened more often, and in 2018, amid Gaza’s Great March of Return, Egyptreopened the crossing, though it was closed during the COVID-19 pandemic before reopening indefinitely again in 2021. This situation lasted until the genocide began in 2023. By May 2024, Israel had captured the Palestinian side of the Rafah crossing and eventually burned it down.
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The ‘Egyptian Blockade’ Myth
The fresh narrative from Israeli propagandists builds on a myth they have repeatedly promoted for decades to deflect blame for Israel’s draconian siege on Gaza – that Egypt was also to blame for the years-long blockade. But that claim also collapses upon the slightest examination.
Israel is the belligerent occupying force in Gaza, which comes with the responsibility of ensuring the well-being and welfare of the occupied people (and end that illegal occupation immediately). Egypt takes no part in closing Gaza’s air, water, or land spaces; Israel does. This obliges Israel to create an alternative to the beleaguered population.
Additionally, while it’s Egypt’s sovereign decision whether to open or close its crossing with Gaza, Israel is bound by the 1993 Oslo Accords to maintain a land corridor between Gaza and the West Bank and allow a seaport and airport in Gaza.
‘Why Doesn’t Egypt Take Gazan Refugees?’
Beneath Israel’s concerted campaign of blaming Egypt for Gaza’s suffering lurks the central goal of its genocide: mass expulsion of Palestinians into Sinai.
“Why doesn’t Egypt take in any Palestinian refugees?” Israel’s propagandists keep asking. “Egypt remains absent from serious discussion of solutions,” pro-Israel military analyst John Spencer protested.
Egypt has already reportedly taken about 150,000 Gazans during the war, while Israel took none (except for 10,000 Palestinian hostages it has abducted and is holding – many without trial, charges, or legal counsel). Israel has even been actively capturing, imprisoning, and deporting Gazan workers in the West Bank back to Gaza since October 7. When the Israeli government quietly allowed about 75 Gazan orphans to be moved to the West Bank in preparation for evacuation abroad, Israeli ministers rushed to fiercely attack this move as “immoral.”
If the Egyptian government opens its borders for Israel to forcibly kick Gazans out, it would render Cairo complicit in ethnic cleansing and the destruction of the Palestinian cause. This is why not a single country around the world has agreed to cooperate with Netanyahu’s “voluntary migration” program of starving and bombing Gazans until they “choose” to flee, because doing so would make them accomplices to genocide.
“Why doesn’t the world take Gazans?” is a classic genocidal talking point to further dehumanize the annihilated population as disposable, unwanted, and repulsive. In 1939, Hitler tried to whitewash his persecution of Jewish Germans by shaming the world for not taking them in. “[T]he whole democratic world is oozing sympathy for the poor tormented Jewish people but remains hard-hearted and obdurate when it comes to helping them.”
Why doesn’t Israel allow Gazan civilians to flee into Israel itself or the West Bank? Why do Palestinians have to flee Gaza in the first place? The hypocrisy is more staggering when taking into account how Israel closed its own airspace and airports and banned Israelis from fleeing during the 12-day war with Iran
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Israel’s obsession with forcibly transferring Palestinians from Gaza to Sinai isn’t the birthchild of this genocide; it’s been a consistent Israeli effort since the Nakba. Whether in 1953, when Israel and the US pressured Egypt to relocate 12,000 Palestinians from Gaza into Sinai; or in 2004, when, according to US diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks, Israel’s National Security Chief Giora Eiland called Gaza a “concentration camp” and said “the solution lies in the Sinai desert;” or Netanyahu asking the Egyptian president in 2010 to give Gazans a strip of land from Sinai.
Blaming Egypt for the Israeli-orchestrated famine, for the Israeli-created aid shortage, or for not being willing to be part of Israel's ethnic cleansing campaign is a grotesque inversion of reality designed to distract from the slow, deliberate strangulation of an entire population under Israel’s genocide. Blaming Cairo serves only one purpose: to whitewash Israel’s total control over every border, every crossing, and every breath of life in Gaza. Egypt may be a regional actor with its own faults and policies, but it is not the occupying power. It does not bomb aid convoys, bulldoze crossings, or dictate who lives or dies in a war zone it does not control. That power – and responsibility – rests squarely with Israel. To pretend otherwise is to collaborate in a propaganda campaign that seeks to deflect accountability, mislead the world, and erase the true mechanics of Gaza’s annihilation. The world must not be deceived: the starvation of Gaza is not a policy failure of Egypt – it is the intended outcome of Israel’s siege, genocide, and occupation. Anything less than that truth is complicity.
Muhammad Shehada is a Palestinian writer and political analyst from Gaza.